Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
kevinboone.me
kevinboone.me
I don't know if I'm losing my marbles, but I don't ever recall a time growing up when my family (or anyone else I knew) were buying a new VCR every year or two.
Meanwhile, the "basement" VCR my dad bought new in '85 still works to this day, but that one was less programmable, so we always used the cheap ones to record off the air.
My own impressions after taking it completely apart (you have to, to get the main board out) and putting it back together, is that the engineers who made it definitely did so with repairability in mind (the service manual is very detailed and way above my level of understanding of electronics), but it was also made to a price point. A high one admittedly, but it's still not nearly "no expense spared" level of robustness.
Got jolted across the room and decided to quietly give up the idea, luckily before anything serious happened.
At an ambient relative humidity of 90%, the tapes themselves would become mouldy at an alarming rate. We did therefore check for mould before playing them, as this could have rubbed off onto the VCRs and then might have spread to other tapes.
I can recall at one point the last generation of rubbish units-- I think they were all basically the same basic Funai model with different badges by then Funai-- I had to open the lid and bend back some metal piece that was preventing operation, because they were so flimsy.
We have crazy powerful DSPs (like a low end GPU), advances in coding and error correction codes, and highly advanced lossy compression algorithms now 8)
Previously on HN: film on vinyl LP (pretty terrible, not much to work with), super high quality VHS reading by hooking up ADCs directly to the video heads + software, and VHS tape streamers (IIRC 1-2 GB with circa 1993 cheap hardware).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KueSbYs7yMU
https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator
https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode
But actually, I spent a few months in a room with a stray cat and all of my DVD and Blu Ray disks and didn't watch a single one. Instead I watched stuff off Tubi, Apple TV, Peacock and my media server. When it was time to clear that room out so tenants could come in I gave most of my discs to the reuse center (sure was agonizing to decide which version of Superman II I wanted to keep!)
Lately it seems like the market for used Blu-Ray players has been flooded with awful Sony units which take more than 30 seconds to boot even if all you want to do is eject a disk. I donated one of those and my NVIDIA Shield and got a used PS4 because even if the boot time is way out of the "consumer electronics" range at least it is a freakin' game console and unlike the Shield I can leave the controller plugged in and expect it to be charged when I want to use it... And the Plex client is great.
In comparison, my kids and I recently watched Jurassic Park on Laserdisc and I was floored by how quickly we were into the movie itself -- it was a handful of seconds.
Also, unrelated, I think we may have worked together a few years ago at a ... "quiet" ad/interactive agency. :)
Even VHS tapes were much more expensive than DVDs right up until DVDs.
But I’ve never heard of a “VHS player” —- always a VCR or a VTP for a playback only unit as uncommon as they were.
We only ever replaced ours once.
A mate of mine had 4 in a stack for the purpose of duplicating and distributing VHS tapes illegally. I think 1 of them stopped working.
Another mate had one that wouldnt rewind faster than playback speed. But they just returned the tapes in dickhead mode rather than paying for a new VCR.
My reuse center got two DAT decks, one of which looked terribly trashed, for $200 a piece. Nein Danke!
I think the story is that the quality of a tape deck is inversely proportional to its need for maintenance. Any deck made in the last 20 years has the same mechanism
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-last-cassette-pl...
which is mediocre sounding but reliable. TEAC makes a dual deck model that costs about $600 (crazy!) but probably sounds about as good as $50 deck from back in the day, they say is the most dependable deck they ever made.
Between having two A/V systems and a tapehead in the family I am still looking for another one. I'd like an elite deck but probably won't get one. My son brought home a reel-to-reel that didn't work and he's still hoping he can get one that does.
On the software end, web.minidisc.wiki has come a long way and there are even projects to expand the functionality of player firmware. Cool hobby, if you're into that.
For recording MDs I use a Sony MZ-N920 with Web MiniDisc Pro.
There's a vinyl record label called Deep Jungle [0] which specialises in sourcing unreleased (or very limited pressings originally) 90s jungle/drum&bass straight from the artists - for a fair price.
Each release has a backstory often involving getting boxes of DATs down from the attic! The music is remastered with modern technology.
Demand is high (literally selling out within minutes!) as the label covers both older customers (who went raving in the 90s) and the younger generation exploring older music.
Everyone in DnB documentaries talks about going to Music House with DATs to get dubplates cut to play in the clubs later on that evening.
This would have been before CD-Rs were commonplace, early 90s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#Hi-Fi_audio_system , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz
Where I worked had mostly moved to sound devices and such for high quality 2 track recordings. Portable Sadie or pro tools for multitracks.
I wasn't able to do DAT because of the extremely high prices. So I mainly ended up with copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy analog cassette, which usually sounded terrible (lots of tape hiss and distortion).
Analog cassettes had their own issues: dual tape decks made very poor copies (I think this was some sort of copy protection feature) although you could use two decks. I was really glad to see analog go- these days, nearly eveyrthing is digitally recorded, with all the conveniences of digital, and many old reel to reel tapes and DATs have been captured with high quality devices.
It's also kind of funny that I lived through the entire CD era- from the first obscenely expensive CD readers to an age when everybody could buy a cheap blu-ray recorder to CDs being obsolete.
In fact they were portable. Cheap, certainly not.
Sold my beloved Sony TCD-D100 some years ago, as it was just sitting around. Beautiful device.
Also check out the TCD-D10. Truly a gem of 80s design.
It did have a Streisand effect though.
The lesson learned by from this in the tech policy space in the 2000s was that legal tech mandates like this were really the worst form of regulation -- they both limited innovation, and didn't really work for the kind of market/business model protection that their advocates desired. I think we'll probably re-learn this after a long period of lax (or relaxed, depending on how you view it) regulation of tech.
Crap like this can permanently alter the trajectory of a company and its products. My speculation about Google’s slowness to productize LLMs were, in part, due to the chilling effect of the Google Books lawsuit.
Sony is all about NIH. They never release a product unless it uses their own proprietary something-or-other. Remember memory stick? Hi8? UMD? PS Vita memory cards? MicroMV? MiniDisc? HiFD drives? SuperAIT? AVCHD? Why do you think DAT didn't use some other existing tape format like Digital8?
It was positioned and priced as a professional device.
In 1990 you could get a decent portable CD player for about $100. That was enough for most consumers.
amusingly, I won a contest for widmer brewing in the 90's when they were looking for interesting toasts to put as phrases under their bottle caps: "To Disc and DAT".
unfortunately, I have a bunch of masters and backups of a digital 4-track on dat, and am unable to access them due to the unhappy deck.
I got to use a Tascam DA-38 a few times. It was an 8 track and I could have sworn it had punch-in recording. It used DTRS, not DAT, but apparently it shared the helical scan. Presumably the 8 tracks were interleaved on a single bitstream, so how was it possible to seamlessly replace one track live? Was there more than one head? How did the clock sync work for simultaneous reading and writing?
> The ability to monitor off tape during recording is due to the DA38's 4‑head drum layout.
0: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/tascam-da38This SoS article doesn't answer it, but provides more background.
https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/all-about-digital-...
Audio distribution dominates the consumer market and CD’s can be pressed much like a vinyl record. Basically, producing a full fledged CD takes about the same effort as manufacturing half the cassette case for DAT.
A CD is a mechanically stamped plastic widget. A DAT tape requires a BOM and assembly before loading it with data.
It literally costs more to ship that CD to the store than to make it. And if that CD is selling for $25 retail (without the tax in the US) you already made at least 100x times the cost.
There was a time period where DJs were passing around DATs of unreleased tracks, and some DJs would try to play sets from them. They had the advantage of not being destroyed by the sand on the beach, but had the distinct disadvantage of no pitch control for proper beat matching. I did have access to two studio rack mounted DAT machines that did have pitch control, but they were top of the line very expensive units which is why no DJ was ever going to have them.
It makes me disproportionately sad to here this every time cassettes are talked about :( as I don't think it's a fair assessment.
Granted, nobody used metal tapes, but if you did, I'd challenge you to tell the difference under normal listening conditions with CD. I'm sure you'd be able to tell in a controlled environment, especially if you're looking out for it, but under normal circumstance metal tapes were HiFi.
I don't think anyone else came close, metal tape or no.
DAT was obviously better but it was famously unreliable because of dropouts and tape alignment issues between different machines.
I had that exact model of DAT. I used it to record some content for a video project, took the tape in for dubbing, and it refused to work on the studio machine.
I had to do a 150 mile round trip to bring my home machine in. I never fully trusted DAT after that.
At that point nobody worried about using the analog inputs to do the copy. The quality was such a leap from cassette that nobody would quibble about an analog stage. I know because I was one such consumer. I had the Sony TCD-D8 portable.
As usual, the record companies' and Congress's behavior in the DAT case screwed the American public. The lie of "perfect digital copies causing piracy" was gobbled up by a legislature of out-of-touch geezers eager to serve corporate interests, when everyone with a brain knew that all "piracy" was taking place on double-cassette boom boxes in dorm rooms. Statistically nobody copying music gave a shit about quality.
And sure enough, when MP3 came along it further proved the point by being a glaringly IMperfect digital copy. So all the audiophiles, home musicians, and indie bands who would have built the market for DAT got screwed by media conglomerates' lies and Congress for no reason.
And oh yeah, that asinine tax on blank media: I would have then made the argument that by paying it, I paid for a license to copy whatever I wanted.
Anyone old enough might remember that Best Buy and Circuit City advertised "any CD $10.99 or less" at a time when they were typically $16. Then, all of a sudden, that deal disappeared... to the point that employees even feigned ignorance. Why?
It turns out that record companies had colluded and strong-armed retailers into rescinding this pricing. They were later found to have illegally ripped consumers off for $400 million (if I remember correctly), which coincidentally was the exact amount they were whining that Napster cost them. I still have a copy of the $13 settlement check I received from this cartel. But you didn't hear that side of the story much, did you? All you've heard for decades has been the caterwauling about "piracy," but never crimes perpetrated by record companies. <cough>SonyRootKit</cough>
DAT's fate stands testament to the relentless ripping-off of the American consumer, under the cover of absurd lies abetted by corporate stooges masquerading as "our" representatives.